Continuing improvements in speed and bandwidth efficiency of digital signal processing components have enabled telecommunication service providers to supply multiple types of signalling channels from one or more sourcing sites to a switching interface serving a number of destination equipments. Accompanying these improvements has been the need for increased storage and data delivery capacity of the data switching and distribution elements that make up the switching interface. In a high data rate/capacity terrestrial system this has typically been accomplished in a brute force fashion, by using a very large (e.g., room-sized) data buffering subsystem, having separate (maximal capacity) data stores dedicated to each port being serviced. Because of its extraordinarily large size and considerable power requirements, this type of a data storage and distribution subsystem is not only impractical, but effectively impossible to deploy in an airborne or spaceborne environment, where payload power consumption parameters must comply with very limited specifications.